Gangs, bullets, skulls and smoking 'J's behind the public school

It's Friday again and you know what that means... we survived another work week. And this was a hard one to get though... but you must already know that yourself.

We ordered in Thai food which cut down on our cooking and cleaning time so we were able to get out to do some metal detecting before it got dark. We loaded the equipment into the car and drove to a public school in which had some luck last year.

When we arrived, there was a gang of teenagers hanging out in the playground equipment. Mary was concerned about their presence but I knew I was bigger than them. We started detecting in the soccer field and Mary picked up two coins embedding in the surface of ground between the goal posts. It wasn't long before the teens creeped over to see what we were doing. I told them stories of pull tabs, bottle caps and balls of foil. They were quite impressed that our metal detector could pick-up foil. (I've never been impressed about how much foil our detecter discovers). They left the schoolyard and we moved to the playground equipment. We found mainly pennies and zippers amongst the climbing equipment and under the swing set we found a metal bullet caseing.

We moved over to the baseball diamond when another group of kids approached us. Again I told them stories of pull tabs, bottle caps and balls of foil. But they had no idea what foil was. I showed them a piece. This confused them and they left. Shortly after we pulled out the letter 'J" and a silver coloured skull charm. The sun had set and we started to walk back to the car since a baseball game had started up. On the way back I spotted a shiny toonie in the grass. In all we found $3.98

Bob and Mary get schooled

It was another beautiful day and Mary wanted to go for a hat-trick (metal detect three
days in a row). She wanted to go back to our toboggan hill to scan it one more
time, but I wanted to go somewhere different. I decided we should go to Charles Daily Park. I thought it would be great location with it's own toboggan hill and it is frequented by visitors year round.

We parked and started to scan at the bottom of the hill, then the side finishing off at the top to discover that we had found not one single thing. no garbage, no iron nails... nothing!!!!

It started to rain for some weird reason though it didn't rain anywhere else in the Niagara Region. We scrambled back to the car and came up with a plan 'B'... which was to go to Tim Hortons. I had definitely learned my lesson, that if people frequently go to a spot that you are thinking of going to... chances are someone has already been there with a metal detector.

After picking up coffees we decided to detect a local school. We decided to concentrate on the soccer field since there were children in the playground and we always try to stay away from children. A runner on the track stopped beside us and was interested in our progress. At the time, we had only found two bottle caps and some foil. I showed them to her and she no longer took interest in what we were doing for the rest of the day.

It was another beautiful day in the sun instead of cleaning house eventually netting us another $1.53.

Anyone for tennis?

Today we were very busy doing chores around the house. We had a couple of hours before I had to get ready for my violin concert tonight. Again it was a beautiful sunny day outside and Mary really wanted to metal detect. It was decided that we could go across the street to scan around the tennis courts in the park.

Leaving the big shovel at home we wandered over with a couple of Tim Horton's (coffees) to do some light scanning. I dialed down the sensitive of the detector to only to pick-up valuable metals a couple of inches down. The park was littered with broken beer bottles and jimmie hatz and realized we had to be carefull what we touched.

As we finished our coffees with used the cups for trash containers and cleaned up the park while we were there. The prospect of finding money in less than 2 hours in this filthy park was beginning to look grim but we persisted.

Cutting the smallest holes necessary, we made our way around the tennis courts replacing our divots to hide our intrusive digging. As we finished our circle we had exactly $2 in our pockets (and two overflowing coffee cups of garbage)